5 ms·

I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among themselves

I think the ribbon is great. Prior to the ribbon, Word, for example, had all of these different components, each with its own UI, all fighting among themselves for screen real estate (the UI version of how this article describes MS, I suppose). The ribbon came along with the expressed intent of unifying all of those UIs so that people could actually use all of Word's features without clobbering the space allocated for, you know, editing their documents. I think it's pretty successful at that, but you have to go back to those old versions of Office to remember just how awful it was. Sure, it's different. It takes getting used to and that's unfortunate (if only they'd gotten it right the first time!). Ultimately, I realize that some people will never like it, and that's reasonable but I hardly think it qualifies as a "train wreck."

corin_ 14y ago
In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.
- deleted 14y ago
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- cowsaysoink 14y ago
  I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that problem with the older versions. Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking generally good.
r00fus 14y ago
It's a train wreck. It's not discoverable (some of those ribbon buttons are god-awful small) and is a huge burden for any existing users to accomodate to (now that it's 7 years old, it's more tolerated and understood, but is still reviled by most users I talk with).

corin_ 14y ago

In my personal experience I've found very few (in fact I can think of none) people who've really got used to the ribbon, in terms of knowing where they can find things on it. Obviously this is an anecdote rather than statistics, but I'm talking a lot of people, who spend much of their working life in Word and Excel. I'm in the same boat too - it just frustrates me that so much of the feature placement within it seems illogical, and I don't quite understand why I've had such a hard time getting familiar with it. I've been using it for years now, and I was completely open minded at the start (when I got the first beta with a ribbon I thought it was an awesome idea), it just hasn't worked out for me.

deleted 14y ago
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cowsaysoink 14y ago
I think the ribbon is okay. I had just as hard a time finding things in Word/Excel 2003 as I did in Word/Excel 2007 but after a while the design started to make sense. I still had to google things but I also had that problem with the older versions. Word 2007 worked much better for mathematical documents than 2003 and once you learned the shortcuts (it even allows some tex like functionality) short reports work out much faster than emacs+auctex or lyx while still looking generally good.

r00fus 14y ago

It's a train wreck. It's not discoverable (some of those ribbon buttons are god-awful small) and is a huge burden for any existing users to accomodate to (now that it's 7 years old, it's more tolerated and understood, but is still reviled by most users I talk with).